A magnetic recording read channel converts an analog read channel into an estimate of the user data recorded on a magnetic medium. Read heads and magnetic media introduce noise and other distortions into the read signal. As the information densities in magnetic recording increase, the intersymbol interference (ISI) becomes more severe as well, (i.e., the channel impulse response becomes longer). In read channel chips, a Viterbi detector is typically used to detect the read data bits in the presence of intersymbol interference and noise. When the channel impulse response is long, however, the hardware complexity associated with the Viterbi detector becomes prohibitively large, as the number of states considered by the Viterbi detector grows exponentially with the length of the channel impulse response. A number of techniques have been proposed or suggested for reducing the complexity of Viterbi detectors.
For example, the hardware complexity of the Viterbi detector can be reduced by using a reduced-state trellis that considers only a shortened impulse response, and canceling intersymbol interference due to the tail of the impulse response for each state by using past survivor symbols as local feedback. See, e. g., .J. W. M. Bergmans, “Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording,” Kluwer Academic Publishers, 326 (1996) or U.S. Pat. No. 6,690,754, issued to Haratsch et al., entitled “Method and Apparatus for Reducing the Computational Complexity and Relaxing the Critical Path of Reduced State Sequence Estimation (RSSE) Techniques,” incorporated by reference herein.
The error rate performance of reduced-state Viterbi detectors with local feedback can approach the performance of full-state Viterbi detectors without local feedback that implement maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE). The maximum achievable data rate of a Viterbi detector implementation with local feedback, however, is considerably lower compared to a Viterbi detector implementation without local feedback, as significantly more operations have to be performed within one clock period. A need therefore exists for a method and apparatus for performing reduced-state Viterbi detection with local feedback at the high data rates that are required by evolving high-end storage applications.